Lucien Lazare

Origins and early life

Lucien Lazare was born at Strasbourg on 24 November 1924 into a Jewish family, and held French and Israeli nationality.

Work and career

Under the Occupation he joined the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Jewish scouts, and worked from 1942 to 1944 in their clandestine branch known as La Sixième, which made false papers and hid Jewish children across the south; he later fought with the maquis de Vabre in the Tarn. He studied at the yeshiva of Aix-les-Bains in 1948, took a doctorate in history at the University of Strasbourg in 1967, taught in France and Belgium, and settled in Israel in 1968, where he founded and directed the René-Cassin high school in Jerusalem.

He then became the leading historian of what he had lived: the organised Jewish resistance in France, a subject long dismissed on the grounds that Jews had been passive, and which he documented network by network. He sat on the Yad Vashem commission that examines candidatures for the title of Righteous Among the Nations, and worked with Simone Veil on the recognition of the French rescuers. He received the prize of the Amitié judéo-chrétienne de France in 2003 and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.